Interpersonal Neurobiology: How The Brain Interprets Relationships

There are always questions about interpersonal interactions and attachment that many of us have asked in various forms at different points in our lives. Often times they’re about our own experiences, but they can even be in regards to people we know.

Caring and supportive relationships provide an individual with trust in self and others, while at the same time increasing levels of self-efficacy. Relationships shape and form how we view ourselves, as well as how we view the world around us.

Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) was developed by Dan Siegel and Allan Schore. IPNB uses the clinical evidence that supports continuous brain growth as its foundation. This technique examines the opportunity for healing trauma by stimulating the brain with powerful and positive persuasion. Studies have shown that conditions that were once considered to be irreversible may actually be able to be transformed in a healthy way.

Because the brain grows continuously throughout our lives, the implications for healing are unending. This technique is being used across a broad sector of the population, including with those who work in the areas of mental health, education, parenting, business, industry, and others.

Research has demonstrated that it is not the traumatic events in our lives that determine resiliency so much as how we make sense of those events that determine our ability to experience resiliency. For example, if one were physically abused as a small child and had a way of making sense of the abuse by blaming themselves, one might expect similar traumatic abuse from others when they make a mistake.

However, if one were to make sense of the abuse by viewing the abuser as having anger issues that are unrelated, one might not expect others to abuse them in a similar manner. When caring and supportive relationships are present in our lives, we are often able to verbally express thoughts and feelings because it is safe to do so. This verbal expression enables something magical to happen in the brain: the left hemisphere integrates with the right hemisphere.

And when this happens, we are afforded the ability to make sense out of whatever is happening or has happened. Because things change over time in terms of how we perceive ourselves and the world around us, it is important to be accepting of the notion that how we make sense out of things will also change.

We should focus on fine-tuning and enhancing the quality of the questions we ask ourselves. The answers will change with time. It's our questions that don't seem to change much.

When we talk with others, speak out loud so as to integrate the left and right hemispheres, we are afforded the ability to not only revisit similar questions, but to find awareness in the subtleties or exaggerated changes in old perspectives. These changes are how we make sense out of our past, and how we continue to heal throughout a lifespan.